Not even Google’s own workforce seems all that enthusiastic about AI.
Internal messages obtained by 404 Media show employees ruthlessly mocking AI tools — including the company’s own internal AI coding tool, Jetski — complaining that they’re unreliable and make their jobs harder.
It’s clear who these jokes are being aimed at. CEO Sundar Pichai has made it a point of pride that 75 percent of the company’s new code is now AI-generated, he claimed in April, but the anti-AI memes suggest that many employees don’t see this as a bragging right at all.
The derisive images were posted to an internal message board aptly called “Memegen.” They can be cutting in their disgust with the tech: one posted last month during Google’s annual I/O conference, for instance, used a screenshot of the company’s stage presentation.
“I/O announces entirely new ways to slop,” the meme said, with the word “slop” shoddily pasted over one the words on the presentation screen. It received more than 100 thumbs up from other employees.
Dozens of these memes abounded on the message board, according to the reporting, with one employee estimating that the total number of anti-AI memes shared inside Google in the past year is in the “high hundreds / thousands.” This number “spikes when there’s product announcements, or model updates, or Jetski breaks down or something,” the employee added.
Another meme mocked Google higherups’ overweening enthusiasm for the tech.
“Aren’t you using AI? Who is still taking so much time? AI is magic, are you a muggle? New best AI tool launched just today,” reads text overlaid on a picture of a fish with a huge forehead that butted its way next to a diver trying to focus on their job.
“Me, working,” reads text labeling the diver.
In boasting about the 75 percent of Google’s code being AI-generated, Pichai made sure to stress that the code is “approved by engineers.” What he didn’t share is what those engineers feel about having to tirelessly scour endless lines of shoddy code.
In a “Barbenheimer“-style meme, an image of a happy-go-lucky Margot Robbie as Barbie bears the caption: “CL author vibe coding massive changes.” (CL stands for changelist, which is code that gets updated in existing projects.) Next to it is a picture of a haunted-looking Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer, labeled: “Code Reviewers.”
As another employee complained, AI may allow code to be cranked out faster than ever, but it’s just shifting the burden of work further down the line. Coders could use AI to generate 100 individual tasks, but seeing the job to the end still needs human review, taking the same amount of time without AI.
“We’re finding that AIs have relieved the pressure and bottleneck of code generation, but that everything else has become the bottleneck, Google-wide testing and build times, human review delays, comparatively slow infra and VCS,” the employee told 404 Media. “The conclusion many colleagues are arriving at is that Google’s infra [infrastructure] and eng [engineering] culture was built to be stable and intentionally slow, and that pressures to accelerate using AI are bumping into that.”
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